Richard Miller, M.D., Ph.D.: The gold standard for testing longevity drugs: the Interventions Testing Program

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Richard Miller. Rich is a professor of pathology at the University of Michigan and the director of Michigan's Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging Research. He served on a variety of editorial and advisory positions on behalf of the American Federation for Aging Research, AFAR, and the National Institutes of Aging, NIA, which we talk about a little bit. He's also served as the editor-in-chief of Aging Cell. He's the recipient of the Nathan Shock Award and the Allied Signal Award, the Irving Wright Award, and an award from the Glenn Foundation, along with a number of other awards for aging research. Dr. Miller's research focuses on the problems of the basic biologies of aging, mostly in mice, but sometimes using other cell lines. Though we speak in this podcast almost exclusively about one of the amazing products of his life's work called the NIA-funded Interventions Testing Programs, the ITPs. Now, over time, you'll probably hear me or you have heard me talk about the ITPs on various podcasts, certainly with respect to the podcasts around Rapamycin and Metformin. The ITPs are a set of studies that are done concurrently in three labs, the Jackson Labs, Rich Miller's lab in Michigan and Randy Strong's lab in UT San Antonio. We go into great detail about what the criteria are and how these are done, but suffice it to say that based on the types of mice that are used and the rigor with which these are done statistically and otherwise, the ITPs represent effectively the gold standard of testing molecules for longevity in arguably the most important subset of mice we could study.
And basically what we do in this podcast is go through the long list of molecules that have been tested, what the results were. A number of these are quite surprising. They're all very interesting, both in positive and negative findings. I've been looking forward to speaking with Rich for about a year, but the reason we delayed this until now is I wanted to make sure that a couple of the findings that were in the pipeline were close enough to publication that we could speak about them confidently. And this podcast can now be released as soon as those manuscripts have been accepted. In particular, one around an SGLT2 inhibitor and another one around nicotinamide riboside, which is a very popular supplement that many people ask about as a precursor to NAD. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Rich Miller.
Rich, thank you so much for making time to chat today. I've been looking forward to this one for almost a year now, but we wanted to wait until some of these exciting results we're gonna get to were far enough outside the pipeline that we could speak about them.

**Richard Miller** (3:54)
Good to chat with you.

**Peter Attia** (3:55)
But I think before we get to the most recent findings of the ITP and even explaining what an ITP is, I wanna give people a bit of a sense of who you are and how you've played kind of an amazing role in the field of longevity along with a couple of your colleagues. So where'd you grow up, by the way?

**Richard Miller** (4:14)
I was born in Philadelphia and when we were five, my mom and dad moved me and my two brothers to the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, Cheltenham Township. I went to high school with Ben Netanyahu, of all people who joined our soccer team as a sophomore.
I was just born slightly too late. If I'd been born three years earlier, I would have had Reggie Jackson as a teammate.

**Peter Attia** (4:40)
Wow, interesting. Split your loyalties there between what city you're gonna choose for sports.
So when did you take an interest in science growing up?

**Richard Miller** (4:49)
When I was about five.

**Peter Attia** (4:50)
That's pretty unusual for a five-year-old, right?

**Richard Miller** (4:53)
Well, I really liked science. I was decent at school, and I always liked getting good grades and stuff like that. And I decided early on that aging was bad for you. It made people sick and then die. I was kind of against that.